During a low-key Mac Pro refresh announcement among a handful of journalists in a white building near its Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday, Apple mentioned details on a new company-branded “Pro” display lineup to accompany its iMac and top-end workstations.

According to carefully selected band of journalists there, Apple is not only hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro design for its professional user crowds, but now wants to complement both the iMac and Mac Pro with a display of its own capable of displaying the industry’s highest pixel densities and contrast levels.

Apple-branded 5K standalone display coming soon

The new “Pro” display will likely be a 5K model with Thunderbolt 3 support, as this is the only monitor standard next to DisplayPort and MHL Alt Mode (USB-C) that supports resolutions above 4K. Likewise, a 5K resolution should allow it to compete with LG's UltraFine 5K display currently sold in Apple Stores, while remaining compatible with current 21.5 and 27-inch iMac models (Mid/ Late-2015) and Late 2016 MacBook Pro models.

Right now the company sells a 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display, its first and only product that gives resolutions above 4K for daily production workflows, drafting, publishing, video and audio production, and photo editing. The company’s highest-end computing product, the Mac Pro, currently features six Thunderbolt 2 ports that can daisy-chain up to three 4K displays simultaneously, but do not offer support for 5K resolutions and above.

The company discontinued its own 27-inch Thunderbolt Display (MC914) line last summer, replacing it in Apple Stores with LG’s UltraFine 5K displays. The displays featured a single first-generation Thunderbolt connection with 1440p resolution. Then in February, several outlets reported several interference problems with LG’s displays when operating them near Wi-Fi routers, causing Apple to remove them from inventory for a brief time while they were retrofitted with additional shielding to fix the problems.

New Mac Pros will still only support 4K and below

Apple once again has short-handed its Mac Pro customers with an early 2017 product refresh that offers six Thunderbolt 2 ports rather than Thunderbolt 3, letting workstations once again operate up to three 4K displays simultaneously. The new models offer no USB-C, and no support for LG’s UltraFine 5K display or the “Pro” display lineup currently under development. The company wants to “rethink” the overall product’s design and direction as it looks to dig itself out of the thermal performance problems presented by the presently claustrophobic, cylindrical product design.

“Will not ship this year”

Apple made it clear during its small conference that next-generation Mac Pros and “Pro” displays “will not ship this year”. Most can hope this means next year, but there is no confirmed release date. The company is focusing on making amends with its Mac Pro customers in little ways, including a base model upgrade from four cores to six, with a complementary AMD FirePro graphics spec bump as well. The other focus for professional users will be some “great” new iMacs in the pipeline that are expected to arrive in 2017, including higher specs more closely relevant to its Mac Pro user base.

In an effort to revitalize its Mac Pro lineup after over three years of silence, Apple gathered a small group of journalists near its headquarters earlier Tuesday to give its thoughts on re-thinking the entire machine’s design and improving its performance in due course.

Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Shiller said to the small crowd: “If we’ve had a pause in upgrades and updates, we’re sorry for that — what happened with the Mac Pro — and we’re going to come out with something great to replace it.”

Today, the company is not necessarily rebuilding the design of its existing Late 2013 Mac Pro models, but they will now receive modest performance bumps in the form of early 2017 refresh units. Apple explained some of the research being done at its Product Realization Lab (PRL) just a few miles away from its headquarters, where prototypes of Mac desktops and laptops are built to test theories and validate design concepts. Schiller then went on to explain how its Mac Pro segment has not necessarily performed up to par with the demands of its core professional and business audiences.

“There’s no black cloth that’s gonna come off something right now,” Schiller said during the meeting. “That’s not why we’re here. While those moments are really fun, we thought it deserved a moment to talk about the Mac, and particularly, the Mac for our Pro users.

He then shared some of the sales numbers the company has reached so far, which include a user base nearing 100 million users for its Mac lineup. Notebook users represent 80 percent of this, followed by desktop users at 20 percent. Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro has seen 20 percent year-over-year growth in fiscal Q1, while the iPhone managed to sell 212 million units in 2016 alone

Mac Pro users are a single-digit percentage of all customers

As to the Mac Pro, he went on to explain that Apple “deeply cares about [these users] and [we’re] dedicated to communicating well with them” to understand what their daily workflows operations look like. He said that Apple’s professional users have generally regarded MacOS as well-received and enjoy the workflow and applications it offers.

Unsurprisingly, however, many of its professional customers have been switching to its all-in-one iMacs in recent years. The reason for this switch, Apple speculates, is either because the devices better meet their needs or because they receive more regular updates and hardware refreshes.

Schiller then calmly delivered the company’s response. “We are in the process of what we call ‘completely rethinking the Mac Pro,” he said. "The company’s ultimate goal is to be able to keep the machine fresh with regular improvements while making it Apple’s “highest-end, high throughput desktop system.”

For computing performance, the company thinks that most professional workloads that benefited from two GPUs were very narrow in scope, and “didn’t materialize to fit as broadly as [Apple] hoped”. Unfortunately, the current cylindrical design doesn’t afford much room to house a larger, single GPU with more performance.

“I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner,” said Software Engineering Chief Craig Federighi. “We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.”

Former $3,999 model is now $2,999, base model gets six-core upgrade

The company's Early 2017 Mac Pro base model will now include a six-core Intel Xeon processor, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs and 16GB of RAM, an upgrade from the previous quad-core option. The previously built-to-order model is now the $3,999 option, and includes an eight-core Intel Xeon, dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics, and 16GB of RAM. Both models include 256MB of NAND flash storage, four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports (not 3.0 unfortunately), and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Upgraded iMac arriving later this year

Meanwhile, an upgraded version of the iMac should arrive later this year. The company says that many of its Mac Pro customers have moved to the all-in-one device, either because it better meets their needs or receives more regular hardware refreshes.

As for the Mac Mini, the company did not talk about its future plans. “The Mac Mini is an important product in our lineup and we weren’t bringing it up because it’s more of a mix of consumer with some pro use.”

Apple’s rivals are targeting those who are still using Apple’s long-out-of-date Mac Pro.

When Apple released the MacPro in 2013 it was a reasonable, if not over-priced spec, in a design like a kitchen rubbish bin. Most hardware makers would have issued a new one every year, but not Jobs’ Mob. Putting out a new model would mean that the last one was not perfect, besides you might be able to convince true-fanboys to buy another one without having to do anything.

What is amusing is that when it launched, Apple was supposed to be telling the world that it still loved the PC market. Before the Mac Pro the last computer had not been upgraded since 2010. There were concerns that Apple was only interested in toys like phones and iPods and had lost interest in the PC market completely.

Workstations from Lenovo, Dell and HP carrying superior technology and are actively using the fact that Apple does not care about the PC any more to tempt Mac Pro users, with better CPUs, GPUs, and memory. They can also manage virtual reality which the Mac Pro can’t.

This new workstations start at about $4,000 and are pricey but when you consider Apple is trying to flog its Mac Pro starting at $2,999 for older Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and AMD FirePro GPU models and DDR3 memory. The Thunderbolt 2 ports are also outdated you have to question if you are getting any value for money at all.

The Tame Apple Press has done its best to claim that the Mac Pro is still a good machine and has some life in it yet. But it is more in the role of a low end workstation is only adequate for video editing rather than the machine everyone wants.

Apple is not interested in VR yet. It will wait for it to take off before it comes along and claims that Steve Jobs invented it. But it has suffered from considerable amount of poor PR for not having its top of the range PC able to handle it.

Having, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey saying he would support the device coming to Macs if Apple ever releases "a good computer” is not the sort of press Jobs’ Mob is used to getting. Having already lost its “innovation” crown it is fast becoming less relevant.

Other World Computing has reported that processor upgrades are possible for Apple’s new cylindrical desktop known as the Mac Pro. It is unknown if Apple is planning to offer users an option to upgrade the processors in the new Mac Pro as new Intel CPUs compatible with this socket are released, or if this just happens to be something that is a by-product of simply installing a better CPU that is socket compatible.

OWC replaced the stock Xeon 3.6GHz 6-core processor with Xeon E5-2667 Version 2 8-core processor clocking in at 3.3GHz. It worked, and the testing proved that the replacement CPU provided a performance increase of 30% over the stock processor that Apple had installed. Currently, Apple is only offering 3 different processor configurations with one 6-core, 8-core, and 12-core options.

The fact that users are able to select another CPU option that is more powerful is great, but because of the cost of Intel Xeon processors it will not come cheap.

It won't be there in thme for Xmas, but it will get to you close enough, as long as you order your beloved Mac Pro today. Apple is offering two configurations, one with a quad-core and the second one with a six-core Intel processor, both featuring two AMD FirePRO graphics cards.

You get the box with a power cord and you even have to buy a keyboard and a mouse.

Once we packed the machine with the best parts available, including a 2.7GHz 12-core processor with 30MB of L3 cache, 64GB 1866 memory 4x16GB configuration, 1 TB PCIe flash storage, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each and the Apple wireless keyboard and Magic mouse we ended up at $9,737.00. Adding a Sharp 32" PN-K321 - 4K Ultra HD LED Monitor gets you to $13,332.00, which is enough to buy a decent entry-level car in many parts of the world.

However, the bucket shaped Mac Pro is probably the most innovative and the most original desktop PC to emerge in years and many will be happy to own it, especially universities, as they like to blow their budget, along with many small and medium businesses in creative industries.

This Mac Pro is a big win for AMD as it is the only available graphics card supplier this time around. It is quite odd given the fact that Nvidia owns a majority of the workstation and professional market that makes movies, designs cars or searches for oil deep in the Earth’s crust.

Although we had a chance to see it earlier, at the Special October Event, Apple has now oficially announced the new Mac Pro that will be based on Intel Xeon E5 CPU, up to 64B of DDR3 memory and dual-workstation GPUs in the form of AMD FirePro.

The Mac Pro, also known as the Time Machine will be available as of December and start at quite a steep US $2999 for 3.7GHz quad-core Xeon, 12GB of memory, dual FirePro D300 GPUs each with 2GB of VRAM and a 256GB SSD. The real novelty here is actually the use of AMD FirePro GPUs with support for 4K displays as well as the actual design of the Mac Pro which features the so called thermal core, a triangualr air duct that is placed in the center and cools all surrounding hardware.

The Mac Pro will be also available with up to 64GB of DDR3-1866 memory, up to 1TB of SSD storage. It definitely looks like a great "little" system but as always, the price is very high - but it's for pros anyway.

Seen and detailed at Cebit 2013 earlier this month, Sapphire has now officially launched its new HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card designed to be used with Mac Pro desktop systems.

The new Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition, based on AMD's GCN architecture, will bring a new level of graphics perfomance improvement to Mac Pro users in a wide range of applications including gaming, audio or video editing and content creation. According to Sapphire, the HD 7950 Mac Edition will bring over 200 percent improvement in games, up to 30 percent in general benchmarks and up to 300 percent in graphics intensive benchmarks when compared to the Nvidia 8800GT which is commonly used in Mac Pro systems.

Although there are no precise details regarding the clocks, Sapphire noted that the card comes with 3GB of GDDR5 memory and delivers up to 2.87 TFLOPS of single precision compute power as well as hardware support for Open GL 4.2, Open CL 1.2 and AMD HD3D tech and APP acceleration. It also comes with all advanced post-processing and scaling operations, courtesy of AMD GCN architecture, including de-blocking de-noising, automatic de-interlacing, Mosquito noise reduction and edge enhancement as well as advanced image quality enhancement technology, such as adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering.

It features two mini DisplayPort outputs with a maximum reoslution of 3840x2160 per display under Mac OSX as well as a Dual-link DVI port with HDCP (2560x1600) and 3GHz HDMI 1.4a port (3840x2160 maximum resolution). As noted by Sapphire, the new HD 7950 Mac Edition works on all Apple Mac Pro models from 2010 with an available PCI-Express x16 slot and needs two 6-pin PCI-Express power coonectors that are supplied with the card.

For those PC users that simply like the look of the new HD 7590 Mac Edition, Sapphire decided to include a dual BIOS switch that switches between non-UEFI MAC OS X/Windows BIOS and UEFI hybrid BIOS for Windows.

Unfortunately, Sapphire did not shere any details regarding the price or the availability date.

Apple's Mac Pro, the flagship "personal computing" product designed and built for professionals, enterprises and enthusiast consumers, is close to receiving another major platform upgrade in the form of Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge-EX processor family.

Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge-E ("E" for desktops, "EP / EX" for servers) is the long-awaited successor to 32nm Sandy Bridge-E (launched November 2011) and is the first processor family to feature 3D-stacked transistors on socket LGA 2011. Where Intel's Westmere-EX featured 6 and 8 core processors, we can expect Ivy Bridge-EP/EX to feature 6, 8 and 10 cores, respectively. The company decided to skip Sandy Bridge-EX server chips and will jump straight to the 22nm process node, as this will allow it to cram 10 cores into a single die.

Leaked 22nm Ivy Bridge-EP/EX 10-core screenshot from Coolaler

Nevertheless, sources close to Apple have hinted that the company has already received Ivy Bridge-E engineering sample (ES) chips from Intel and has already begun product testing. By the time Q4 2012 comes around, we can expect Apple's new Mac Pro lineup to feature both 6 and 8-core Ivy Bridge-E chips with significant performance scalability (see: 30-percent faster IPG), lower power consumption and lower TDPs on socket LGA 2011.